On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Shelley Powers<shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
> For instance, I don't think that there are people supporting keeping
> summary that aren't also in favor of supporting HTML that is
> intuitive. But their assumption is that the failure with summary is
> less that it was unintuitive than HTML4 did not do a good job about
> explaining what it is, or how to use it.
For what it's worth, I think this is one of the core reasons for the
disagreement. That some people think that we can do better with
@summary in the future than we have in the past. Through things like
better wording in the spec, as well as other forms of outreach and
education.
Others think that no matter how hard we try, @summary will see no
greater success in the next 10 years than it will in the past 10.
No conspiracies, no greater or lesser care for AT users. Simply
disagreement regarding how well we can affect people.
I happen to fall into the group of people who think that authors are
extremely hard to affect. That what we put in the spec is only going
to affect an insignificant number of authors, and that outreach and
advocacy is going to reach very few.
The reason I believe this is purely based on experience, I don't have
any data to back up my belief. The only thing I have resembling data
is that I know that we've been advocating people to write conforming
HTML pages for many years, yet only a small portion of pages on the
web is conforming, so it seems like advocacy hasn't worked very well.
I hope I am wrong in my belief and that advocacy will work. Especially
if we do put @summary into the HTML 5 spec.
/ Jonas